What Is A Tool?
I'll say here at the top this isn't a well-researched essay or a grand point I'm making. I'm just thinking aloud.
What is a tool? As in, what defines a tool? I consider myself an artist and a craftsperson, so tools are pretty important to me. Not that I am a wizened veteran, but I'm lucky to be doing this full-time for a while now, and I've never had to consider this question. I find AI programs repulsive, in the literal sense of the term, in that I am repulsed by them. I am negatively polarized to their presence, I've never touched a coding tool or a chat bot, and what little AI is forced upon me such as in search results I avoid as much as my frail human perception allows. Setting aside the score of dealbreaking reasons to not use AI, purely on the level of craft and art, I do not want to use any of these 'tools', and lately I've been thinking about why that is exactly.
To that end it's been useful for me to turn in my head what I consider a tool, and what repulses me about AI with its anti-tool quality. A hammer is a tool, a piece of metal shaped and weighted to drive nails or just hit things really hard. I can pick it up, use it, and set it down. I can evaluate its properties and compare it to the task at hand. Through use I can learn to use hammers better, or discern between varieties of hammers, nails, and materials. I don't know if I've identified all tool qualities here, but a hammer feels like a tool.
Is a digital calculator a tool? A calculator performs a distinct function of calculating mathematical operations. Like the hammer it is discrete, in that I start and stop using it according to my own judgment. Does using a calculator more teach you math better, or simply the calculator better? Growing up I was taught the latter until it became the former. While it’s important to know your times tables, fewer people are doing trigonometry by hand. To some degree learning math is about learning principles, so the calculator would be the tool to achieve those principles? There's no virtue in driving a nail with the palm of your hand.
What about reliance on a calculator? Conservative members of my family were proud to be able to do math on a slide rule, whereas I am happy to do complex equations digitally. I don't know if I can say which one of us "knows" math better. I'm not convinced this is even a useful question, since neither of us are professional mathematicians. I've basically learned as much math as I need to in order to make games, and so my understanding is a peculiar slice of the discipline.
I use a digital calculator because it helps me calculate what I need as a means to an end. But more importantly, I trust a calculator. Not every calculator (or hammer) is made perfectly, but in my experience with calculators I have built a knowledge that contains a reference for what a calculator should be and how it operates. This contains both mathematical verification—as in knowing 1+3=4—and also general principles of math—like decimal precision or rounding errors. I rely on calculators that I trust to produce reliable answers, knowing that if an unexpected result occurs it is likely because of my ignorance than a fault in the tool. Therefore I treat hammers and calculators as tools.
Is complex software a tool? Let's examine the operating system of a computer, though you could think about anything sufficiently complex such as a DAW, or game engine, or video editor, etc. Operating systems are extremely complex pieces of software, and it would take lifetimes to understand their nuances. I rely on operating systems to perform many more unseen tasks than a calculator, and it would be impossible to independently verify their operation as I can with the mathematical calculator.
Nevertheless, I have a great many expectations of my operating system. When it accesses hardware, runs software, connects to the internet, and displays some kind of interface that mediates my interaction with those things, I have expectations of those functions. I don't know how the computer connects to the internet or how displays work, but I can identify when those things are working incorrectly. Now I am relying more on trust over verification, in comparison to the calculator. It's certainly possible that the next time I use the computer nothing will display on the screen, and I know something is wrong but not immediately what or why. I have built a series of checks that I can perform to diagnose the issue, but those are also reliant on trust—that the settings menu can read hardware, or the cable is functional, whatever. I also have to extend a great deal of trust to the makers of the operating system, and every piece of software on it, both that they will function reliably and nobly, not abusing my trust for goals that I disagree with. As best I can, I try to treat my operating system as a tool, and it generally meets that expectation. It's an extremely complex tool, and I've traded my understanding for trust, but I can verify the consistency of its operations with my prior experience. I can draw a link of the quality of consistency from the hammer to the calculator to the operating system.
That idea of consistency has become rather important to me. As an artist and craftsperson, I care about my work, and I also care about how I do the work. Getting better at something is both a means to an end in that the final work can be improved, and also a motivating goal in its own right. Self-improvement requires both a level of introspection and external validation of your work, at least for me. Improving at a craft necessarily requires improving at the tools and contexts in which to use it, such as our hammer and all the nails and materials. There is a cyclical process starting from the introspection and validation of your work that bounces around until it reaches the point of how you used the tools to create the work. Improving at a tool necessarily evaluates both your goals with the tool, and whether your goals and expectations aligned with the performance of the tool. For a hammer, this is a relatively simple loop. For a calculator this becomes harder, or at least more complex and nuanced, and more still with an operating system. I rather enjoy this process, even if it means being frustrated and making many mistakes.
Some tools are chaotic. I enjoy film photography, as an art it is a deeply unpredictable process, with countless variables that can affect the final exposure on the stock. Of course it's possible, with deep study, to become a very good film photographer and have the ability to clearly envision the final outcome of an image before you shoot it, but that's not how I treat it. I let the film take over to some degree, and accept that some shots will be ugly or unreadable as a result. Yet I still think of film stock as a tool, and I believe that it is because of the intentionality in my use. I don't only want an image of a scene in front of me, I want an image on film. The film creates a random element that cannot be controlled. In the final accounting of the image, the viewer can assess for themself which elements "were random" and which "were intended", even though the randomness itself is intentional. As an artist I made a choice to say "this element of the image I left to chance, and it helped create this final result", and that can reflect on the resulting piece of art as a whole. Intentionality does not inherently mean control.
How discrete is an AI coding program? This appears to be a difficult question to answer through observation of how coders describe their use of AI. When I write code, the code stops writing when my fingers do. I am making concrete a vision I have in my head of my goal, like the nail being driven into the wood. These operations feel discrete to me in a way I find pleasing. This lack in AI coding programs feels very stark to me, one doesn't seem to be 'using a tool' in a literal sense. The programmer describes their goal and the computer runs some fantastically complex operation to realize that description. But when the AI stops outputting code, an operation is complete, but where was the tool? The programmer has not 'used' anything in a meaningful way. Does the programmer feel like they have started and stopped doing something? The computer awaits further input, but the cyclical nature of using a tool doesn't seem to have been fully completed, in my view. Whether the programmer validates the work of the AI operation is up to them, and I am skeptical of how often this happens. If it does happen, this seems akin to trading your craft for following around a blinkered programmer who has memorized the dictionary but doesn't understand grammar; if it doesn't then you have no care at all for your work.
So, is AI a tool? With my personal evaluation, or just intuition: no, it is not. The operations of an AI system are extremely complex, so much so not even their creators know enough about its operations. This to me is a serious breach of trust, immediately violating a quality I associate with tools. While no one person at Apple probably understands the entirety of MacOS, as an entity they are broadly structured to understand the system they created. Similar in principle to the Linux distros. I may not understand it, but I trust that they do. That trust may be guarded, but it's there. I don't trust a single person or the organization of an AI company to know what the product is they're making.
Can I evaluate the output of a AI to use a reference point for my own work? No. Specifically, because I'm not doing the work. I pick up a hammer to drive the nail, I type 2^8 into the calculator, I move my mouse and type at my keyboard to interface with the operating system. In these processes, I have a goal, I perform the action, and I see the result. When I'm writing code, I envision a structure in my mind about control flows and variable usage, write code to modify that, and see the results. That result, and more specifically that work, is very useful to how I perform my craft. If I am thinking to myself "wait is 2^8 128 or 512" I use a calculator to verify my understanding of math. I imagine a code structure and attempt to implement it. I have an ideal behavior in mind, but the process of writing the code necessarily shapes the structure and allows me to understand what it is my real goals are. Typically my real goals are 'make a video game', which is a distant and abstract notion that is only realized—in a literal sense, as in to envision it fully, not just bring to existence—through the work of writing code.
Can you have intentionality using an AI coding program? I don't know, but I have my suspicions. You can certainly have goals. You can accept that the tool can produce random outputs like the film stock, but my suspicion is also that the output is always measured against the goal. This isn't even anything to do with being surprised by an unusual outcome, a feature of both film stock and AI coding programs. I think intent is important, both as a practice and a way to evaluate the final result of someone's art. If you used an AI coding tool, what did you do? What part of it is you? If it's all the output of random weights, you didn't make a choice about what is or isn't in your control.
I believe there's a fundamental difference in mindset that defines a tool, that it is used to do things with. I use a hammer to drive nails to build a shelf; I use a calculator to perform math to understand astronomy; I use an operating system to connect to the internet to talk to my bitchy group chat; I use a programming language to write code to make a game.
I evaluate tools for trust and intentionality. Perhaps everyone's considerations of what makes for a tool are different, and perhaps there are more qualities than these. For me a good tool is deliberately designed to allow me to trust it and use it with purpose. I don't know if you need to use tools to practice a craft, but that's how I want to practice my crafts. I have more than one goal when writing code to make a game: I want the game to behave in a certain way, but I also want to understand code better, understand games better, and generally practice the craft of making video games. In some ways my craft is reliant on tools that I do not fully trust, like the Unity game engine, and evaluation of its use is ongoing, but when I write code for it I can still practice my craft. I cannot author a video game completely from scratch in bare metal computer language. I use the engine as a tool that does things for me, but at some point the work I'm doing I do by hand because that's the work.
AI programs produce stochastic outputs, extruded into a shape that appears to be the result of a craft. I don't believe one can use it to practice a craft. I can't trust the AI program nor the people who make it, and I can't use it with an intentionality like other tools. So in these senses, for me, they're not tools.